http://bleacherreport.com/tb/b6qLN
Science has proven the curve ball, snap and drop are an illusion. It has a slow and gradual curve but it seems to do much more. The key is to keep your eye on the ball all the way .
I thought everybody already knew this.
They do curve, of course, as anyone can see on a slo-mo replay. They just don’t curve MORE closer to the plate. That’s an illusion of perspective.
Everybody does not know anything.
But why is it hard to hit? Also the jargon includes a curve that drops off the end of a table. baseball itself pushes the image . Watch the game tomorrow and come back.
I recall that my 12th-grade physics teacher (in 1988) mentioned the same thing. Later, my college physics professor proclaimed the opposite: that curveballs actually do break. I believe the latter. If a curveball loses 10+ mph over 60 feet, it seems obvious that air resistance would have a bigger affect on the ball later in its flight. Thus, there would be a pronounced change in the flight path that could be described as a “break”. And I believe that the path would still be considered “parabolic”.
But I’m no physicist and admit that I could be missing something, and completely off base. I just wanted to point out that this debate has been going on for some time.
Have you ever tried to hit a reasonably effective curveball? I don’t see why it being difficult to hit and it defying the laws of physics have to be correlated like that. The ball “drops off a table” relative to the batter’s expectation, not relative to an observer watching from the side. Fastballs don’t literally jump on the batter, either, and sinkers aren’t literally heavier than other kinds of thrown baseballs. But sometimes a ball does something the batter doesn’t expect.
A wipeout curve of the kind you’re talking about that is traveling on a parabolic path from the pitcher’s hand to some point level with the batter’s ankles will appear to be coming on a straighter path at roughly waist height, same as most pitches, and then drop to the lower point after the batter has started his swing. To the batter, the ball has dropped. Of course it’s an “illusion,” in a manner of speaking; in the fraction of a second the batter has to decide how to approach the ball, the path of the ball appears to have sharply turned downward. That’s why the pitcher did that. The fact that it was in fact on that downward path the whole time is sort of irrelevant to the batter.
The curveball is not an illusion. The curve has been measured, and the mechanism for it is well-understood (it’s caused by the Magnus effect, in which the spin of the ball causes the wake to be deflected to one side, and also causes the pressure on one side of the ball to be greater than on the other side).
I read once that back in the 19th century someone set up three poles in a row and threw a baseball so that it went to the left of the first pole, the right of the second, and the left of the third (I wish I had a citation for this).
What is an illusion is the perception on the part of the batter that a curveball changes direction suddenly as it approaches the plate. This is caused by the perspective of viewing the pitch head-on. The ball accelerates laterally, so that the sideways speed of the pitch gets greater as it gets closer to the plate. Viewed from the side, the path of the pitch has a fairly constant curve, but viewed head-on it looks like it “rolls off a table.”
I doubt the path of a curveball would be parabolic because the direction of the force vector that is causing the ball to curve will change as the ball changes directions.
To demonstrate, if you have a ping pong ball and paddle, hit the ping pong ball slightly downward with a crap-ton of back spin, and you will see the ball travel downward, rise slightly, then fall as it travels along its path. I know this is different spin than one would impart on a curveball, but it illustrates how things change when you are not neglecting the presence of air.
I wonder if a softball is subject to the same rules. I batted against the pitcher of " A King and His Court" a traveling softball show. He struck me out from second base with curves that were unreal. My best satisfaction was not bailing on the 3rd pitch and actually taking a swing. I dove away from the first pitch and it sailed over the plate. I also semi bailed of the second one. I gutted out the 3rd assuming Feigner had good enough control not to kill me. I wanted to get a piece of it.
A curve is not an illusion but the idea that it does something late in the pitch is wrong.
I would think it self evident that it is hard to hit, with force, a little ball travelling anywhere from 80 to 100 miles an hour propelled from less than sixty feet away from you.
It’s hard enough even if you were to know the speed and path of every single pitch, as Mariano Rivera demonstrates; he only throws one pitch. If the pitch could take one of a half dozen paths and speeds, and you have a fifth of a second to decide where and how and when to swing… well, there’s a reason not a lot of guys can play major league ball.
Bear in mind that batters generally fail because the pitch they swing at is not the pitch they were prepared to swing at. A batter who knows a curveball is coming and prepares for it and gets the curve in his hitting zone will usually destroy it no matter how much it curves. If the batter instead gets a fastball, he’ll probably miss it or freeze up, even if it doesn’t break at all. At major league velocities, it’s very unusual for a batter to be able to initially guess one pitch and then adjust fast enough to hit another.
I used to have a book that had strobe photographs of a good curveball from the side. It really does curve more than the natural drop of a fastball, but the batter makes the swing decision as the ball has risen and fallen very little from that perspective. Remember that the curve the ball follows peaks only a little above the release point. This means that the ball rises only a little, then falls back to the original height, and right about there the batter is close to the final moment to decide where to swing. The final 2 feet (I’m guessing) of drop comes after this decision.
A hanging curve doesn’t drop nearly as much, and good hitters (and they’re almost by definition pretty good to be in MLB at all) can make a slight adjustment, since the lateral speed is less with a curveball.
This has a lot to do with it. Distance from release point to strike zone is actually less than 60.5 feet (consider pitcher’s release point distance from front of rubber), so decisions have to be made by the batter very quickly.
Curve balls most certainly do break.
Nope they gradually curve.
The curve on a bowling ball does accelerate at the end as the the forward motion slows and the spinning ball is allowed to catch.
Do you think this (and other examples) are why we assume the same happens with a baseball?
No, not really. The baseball is “Catching” the air all the way.
Essentially what’s being described here is an illusion of perspective, which can best be described if you stand up, assume a batting stance, look to where the pitcher is, and imagine what’s happening.
Sixty feet away, Roy Halladay is preparing to throw you his nastiest slider. If you aren’t scared, you should be, but here it comes. Now, what actually happens is that the ball curves along its entire patch from the moment Halladay throws it. Three things happen:
-
The ball’s rotation and the effect of the stitches moving against the air cause the ball to begin curving to Halladay’s left and down. IF you are batting righthanded it is moving away from you, if you are lefthanded, towards you.
-
The ball, which was launched from about seven feet off the ground, is moving towards a target about three feet off the ground, plus gravity is pulling it downward, and so it will fall several inches in addition to where the curve was taking it.
-
The ball, incidentally, is slowing down from about 90 miles per hour at the moment of release to maybe somewhere in the low 80s.
So the ball is describing a curve that is moving to Halladay’s left and down. It is also slowing a little, though the effect of this is minor.
When it first leaves Halladay’s hand you are looking at the ball as it is more or less coming towards you; it’s sixty feet away and its path describes a line only two to three feet away from you. So from your initial perspective the ball is mostly coming at you. Its curve at this point is difficult to discern. But as it gets closer its curve appears to be more pronounced because it begins to describe a movement that’s less right at you and more in front of you and moving past you. From sixty feet away it appeared to be coming more or less right at the strike zone, but as it gets close it is not where you expect it to be; the appearance is that it curves more later in its flight, though in fact the curve was (more or less) the same all along.
If you’re going to argue about whether curve balls break, please agree on a definition of “break” first.
This research (analysing a soccer ball) suggests that the ball does indeed follow an increasingly tightening curve (spiral), but that the effect is not seen until the distance is great enough to allow enough of the trajectory to be visible. The researchers (at least in this article) do not mention baseballs or other sports, but do state:
Presumably this includes baseballs, which are spheres.
Note that this involved a spinning (seamed) ball, so it at least approximates a baseball; many shots in soccer are of the “knuckleball” variety, with newer balls (see the now infamous Jabulani) increasingly eliminating the seams.
If you have not seen Roberto Carlos’s goal against France, it is spectacular. Be sure to view the field-level slow-motion starting at around 0:45.
Throwing it out there FWIW – perhaps there is something going on with baseballs that this experiment does not account for (or the distances are too short), but at least a couple of other physicists* have a different take on spinning spheres.
- French physicists, I now notice. Wonder if they were funded by Fabien Barthez Research Labs :).
This video is actually very on point. Watch the two replays at the end: the first is from directly behind the kicker, and the second is from an angle behind and to the left of the kicker.
In the first one, it looks like the ball leaves his foot heading right and curves left fairly constantly, but the second replay is nearly in line with the initial path of the ball, and in that replay it looks like the ball is going fairly straight and then suddenly breaks left. From the first replay, it’s clear the ball doesn’t suddenly curve, but from the second, it sure looks that way.
It also has a lot more surface area than a baseball.
When you get older and switch to softball you can see the difference in ball curve.
Reminded of the ol’ Dizzy Dean story: some college professor said that a curve ball doesn’t curve. Dizzy invited the professor to stand behind a tree, “I’ll whomp him,” with a curveball.